Brad Elterman Gets the Best Shot

Milk Made Magazine handed 19-year-old model Leila Spilman to five different unknown photographers and told each of them to shoot her however they wanted. The reward for the winner: some praise, a warm feeling, and—the premise implied, with appropriate winking—maybe Leila herself, assuming he didn’t completely blow it in the process.

My favorite of the five is Brad Elterman’s "In The Street" series. He does the simplest thing: natural light, actual street, no filter nonsense layered over everything. I have a specific contempt for the heavily processed aesthetic that dominated photography around then, and Elterman just didn’t do it. She looks like a person. A very good-looking person who seems comfortable in her own skin, which is harder to photograph than it sounds—most of the other four entries prove it by trying too hard.